Fiat Lingua!

From David Peterson, President of the non-profit Language Creation Society (LCS), comes the welcome announcement of a new journal aimed at the interests of language creators.

The LCS is launching a new online journal called Fiat Lingua. A new article will appear on the first of every month. Articles will be available in PDF form on publication, and will be free to download. Articles themselves are self-selected and published with permission, with the copyright reverting to the author upon publication. On occasion, when we’ve received enough material, LCS may publish an anthology of Fiat Lingua articles in print and electronic form. Information about such anthologies will be released when relevant.

If you’d like to contribute an article to Fiat Lingua, contact us at fiatlingua@conlang.org. We’re looking to include both formal academic-style papers and informal contributions (humor, news, tips, reviews, editorials, interviews, interesting works in progress, poetry, short fiction, conlang sketches, puzzles, etc.). All contributions, academic and nonacademic, should be of interest and value to a readership of people primarily interested in invented languages. You may include color, but future print anthologies will likely be in black and white. And, as publication will be online, authors will also have the opportunity to edit articles after they’ve been published. If you have a question about a project you think might be suitable but you’re unsure, feel free to send us an e-mail and we can discuss it.

The purpose of Fiat Lingua is to provide conlangers with a visible forum to publish papers related to conlanging or conlangs — especially subjects or projects which don’t lend themselves easily to listserv or forum posts.

The new journal’s first essay is “Case Marking and Event Structure: One Conlanger’s Investigations” by Matt Pearson, a professor of linguistics at Reed College. This essay is one of the “academic-style papers”, not an “informal contribution”. Some amateur conlangers may find this sort of thing a bit dense and intimidating, especially as the first half of the essay explores nominal cases systems in various real-world languages, some of them pretty obscure. It’s only in the second half that the author gets more “autobio-graphical” and talks about his own invented language. But if this essay is anything to judge by, the journal should be a valuable new venue for the discussion of artificial languages. I look forward to seeing more.

Having said that, I must now digress …

I’ve always found it interesting that the vast majority of conlangers devise complex case systems for their languages, with eight, ten, or more cases — much more complex than most real-world languages today. Seemingly, these conlangers don’t mind their languages going unlearned and unused (except by themselves), as intricate case systems are usually quite an obstacle (usually, but not always: witness Quenya and Klingon). Why do they do it? I guess I should rephrase — why do we do it — since I have been just as guilty. I haven’t worked on invented languages of my own in quite a few years, but at one time, I was simply mad for it. I was a conlanger avant la lettre. As I’ve written before, my friend Gary and I used to call them “Artificial Dialects”, and we had binders full of them. (They still exist, but they’ve been doing no more than collecting dust for what feels like a century now.)

So, why? Sometimes it’s out of the wish for “results [that] are sufficiently bizarre to satisfy my taste for the exotic”, as Pearson says. He also aims at “retaining the feel of a natural human language”, but the majority of the most widely spoken languages in the world today are shedding (or have already shed) their case systems. Of widely spoken languages that still do have case systems, real or vestigial, most are usually much simpler today than they were in centuries past. As a result, real-world languages tend to be more easily learned by wide audiences (which, in turn, often further erodes case systems and other complex grammatical features). The most successful artificial languages (like Esperanto) are usually the ones with the simplest grammatical systems.

Faced with that reality, why push on and do it anyway? Maybe your language is meant to have been spoken millennia ago, or by isolated pockets of indigenous people? Or maybe the real, secret reason is just to show off. “Look at me! Look how much I know about linguistics! I’m going to demonstrate every single oddity I’ve ever read about in my conlang, so buckle your seat-belts!” Things that are complex, it stands to reason, require more careful devising, more knowledge, more effort, and we want people to be impressed, by golly! And it’s not just nominal case systems. The same motivations apply to all aspects of conlang grammar, syntax, phonology. “Look at me! Look at this amazing inventory of sounds! I can pronounce a full range of aboriginal clicks, so you had better learn too! Look, I’ve discovered consonants for which I had to invent new glyphs! Oh, and I’m giving you tones as well. Why wouldn’t I?”

Why indeed? Such languages might be fun in theory and for study — and I don’t wish to deny anyone their fun, or their learning by doing — but with only a handful of exceptions, they will never be spoken outside the conlangers’ basements. My own invented languages certainly never got any further. :)

The Perelandra Project

With the success of recent films based on the works of both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as well as that of the musical version of The Lord of the Rings, you might be thinking, isn’t it about time for an opera based on Perelandra, the second book of Lewis’s Space Trilogy?

Well, the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society and the Donald Swann Estate agree. As they explain here, “The opera [Perelandra] was written in collaboration with C.S. Lewis between 1960 and 1964. The sale of the film rights shortly after Lewis’ death, however, placed a long-term embargo on its performance. The opera is now receiving a long-awaited second premiere. It is to be performed in its original, three-act version as a ‘theatrical oratorio’.” The music is by Donald Swann, also known (among other things) for the musical adaptations of Tolkien’s songs and poems published in The Road Goes Ever On. The libretto — which C.S. Lewis called “just stunningly good. It brought tears to my eyes in places” — is by David Marsh.

The performance will take place in Oxford, England on 25, 26, and 28 June 2009. And what’s an opera without an international colloquium on the novel? This will take place at Oxford University over 26–7 June, with a keynote address by Walter Hooper. You’ll find the Call For Papers, which “may treat [any or] all aspects of Perelandra (literary, theological, historical and other)”, here. The deadline for abstract proposals is 20 April 2009.

As if that weren’t enough, they’re also running a competition for original artwork inspired by the novel. Submissions will be judged by the eminent fantasy artist, Alan Lee, also known for his illustrations of Tolkien’s world. Winners may be displayed at the opera and colloquium, and could even earn a spot in the CD, production book, and other accompanying material. Plus, there’s a first prize of £100 and two second prizes of £50. Submissions must be received by 15 February 2009. For more details, follow this link.

This could well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — especially to see the opera, which has only been performed once before, more than forty years ago. For those who can’t make it, a recording is in the works, but if you have the means (alas, I don’t!), then this is a combination of events that shouldn’t be missed.

(Hat-tip to Gary for bringing this to my attention! :)

Glossopoeia and the Internet

There’s an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times today, all about how the Internet is facilitating the spread of artificial languages (or conlangs). Made-up languages themselves are nothing new, of course. Whether for popular culture – for literature, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin or Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat; or for movies like the Star Trek franchise – or with the more altruistic goal of brokering world communication – Esperanto, Volapük, Ido, Solresol, and others – artificially constructed languages have been around literally for centuries (just ask Dr. Pangloss). But with the explosion of instanteous worldwide communication made possible by the Internet, any Tom, Dick, or Harriet’s new made-up language can suddenly attract speakers. Now that is a wild thought!

In the case of Sonja Elen Kisa and Toki Pona, as discussed in the Times article, her own private language (well, more or less private – she did post it online, after all) now has “more than 100 speakers today.” How strange would it be to create a language – for whatever personal reasons one might have – and then to start hearing, straight out of the blue, from complete strangers “singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words”? This is either really cool or really creepy – or perhaps it’s somewhere in between.

Toki Pona even has its own Wikipedia article, a sure sign of some success. And if you want to learn it yourself, there’s a wealth of information at its official site.

The Times article goes on to establish a background context using the examples of Klingon, Esperanto, Loglan, and Tolkien’s constructed languages. Surprisingly for an article of this type, the information on Tolkien is accurate and fairly detailed, referring to his “secret vice”, and correctly identifying four of his invented languages. The author, Amber Dance (and did you ever hear a name more suited to an, err, exotic entertainer? :), even gets it right that that the languages came before the speakers, before the myths, legends, and geography of Middle-earth, rather than vice versa (see Tolkien’s letters #131 and #180, for example).

One thing I’m curious about is why – from a psychological standpoint – people want to learn somebody’s made-up language. I do understand (rather well) the desire to create made-up languages. My friend Gary and I used to make them up years ago, largely inspired by Tolkien himself. We called them our “Artificial Dialects”, and though they usually never got much further than a sketch of the grammar and a small vocabulary (again following Tolkien’s lead), they were quite a valuable intellectual and imaginative exercise. One of our languages, Kindric, intended to accompany a fantasy novel I was writing at the time, eventually swelled to something like 10,000 words! In Kisa’s case, again, the creation of Toki Pona had a clear psychological motive, but what about the learning of it by all those people who’ve never met her? What motivates someone to make that kind of investment, to learn it, compose in it, sing songs in it, and so forth?

I guess they just enjoy it. Perhaps it’s just a leisure activity like any other. Perhaps they’d just say hakuna matata. Or in Toki Pona, ale li pona. (There! I’ve just written the first entry for the first Swahili - Toki Pona dictionary. The rest of you Toki Ponans, get on finishing that, will you? :)

Vermont — There and back again (an independent scholar’s holiday) [Updated]

Not too long ago, I traveled to Vermont for Tolkien 2007, a small but rewarding conference hosted by Michael Faletra and Chris Vaccaro at the University of Vermont at Burlington. This was my second time (in as many years) visiting Burlington for this conference. I had a simply wonderful time both years, and I’ll definitely be there in 2008. So at the suggestion of my friend Gary (who lives in Boston and who accompanied me to UVM both this year and last), I thought I would share a tale or two from my adventures there.

The conference takes place in April, but the weather this year was miserable. It was unseasonably cold and rainy for most of my trip (whereas last year, the weather was cool but beautiful). We had hoped it would improve, but it actually got worse, culminating in a veritable Fimbulwinter, the likes of which I had never seen — except in the opening of the film Fargo. After the conference, we ventured up to Montréal for the day (about 100 miles away), and on the way back, we were caught in a blizzard of apocalyptic proportions (quite something for a Texan like me!). Something like a foot of snow fell in just three, maybe four hours. During the harrowing drive through the heart of the Green Mountains in pitch darkness, we ended up careening off the road — luckily, we weren’t on top of a mountain at the time! Within sixty seconds, three separate vehicles full of intrepid Vermonters had stopped to make sure we were okay. Bless them! We were, but we couldn’t get back onto the road on our own steam, city boys that we are. A very nice guy from Milton pulled us back onto the road with a chain and his 4x4. I have pictures of the whole ordeal — in which Gary and I come off looking much more manly than we really are. (I could probably be persuaded to post one. [Update:] How about four?)

But outside of the alarming caprices of Mother Nature, Burlington is a wonderful place to visit. It’s full of progressive thinkers (and more than its share of weirdos — making Burlington the Austin of Vermont, as some people like to say). Speaking of weird people, after making it back from our traumatic blizzard experience, we were accosted by a strange dude from Texas outside the Inn. He kept us out there talking in the falling snow for what seemed like eons. No surprise when he told us, out of the blue, that he was bipolar.

Burlington also has great coffee and tea houses (make sure you visit Speeder and Earl’s Coffee House and Dobrá Tea), plus maple syrup and cheddar cheese factories aplenty! Not to mention Ben & Jerry's and the Magic Hat Brewery. None of which we have in Texas — although Shiner is nothing to sneeze at. Vermont is really my kind of place!

When we drove up to Burlington in 2006, we decided just to chance it on accommodations. We drove around looking for a likely spot and happened on the most unexpected thing of all (but still somehow “typical” of Vermont): a Tibetan Inn, apparently the only one in the United States. I highly recommend it the next time you’re in Burlington. The rooms have a lovely view across Lake Champlain to the Adirondack Mountains in eastern New York. And the proprietor and his family are wonderful people. (Allow me to interject, “Free Tibet!”)

So, if you’re looking for a Tolkien conference and a little bit of adventure, definitely keep Vermont in mind for next year. And if you want to know more about any of this, feel free to comment with questions.

Always read the reviews! [Updated]

So, this morning I was perusing a Medieval Studies catalog I just got in the mail from Cambridge University Press, when I came across a very interesting-sounding new book, Satan: A Biography, by Henry Ansgar Kelly of UCLA. It immediately made me think of Jack Miles's similarly titled, God: A Biography, which I have at home (but haven't read yet).

I wondered whether Satan was available from Amazon (now there's a strange thing to write!) and whether it would be less expensive than ordering directly from CUP, so I looked it up. It was indeed available, but luckily somebody's already read it and posted a thoughtful review, warning readers away. “No way, Jose. Not yet, Josette” — really?! Are ya kiddin' me?!

So, it sounds like it's definitely not worth an outright purchase (but I might still get it from the library). The lesson here? Always read the reviews! Thank you, C.T. Schreep!

[Update:] My friend Gary, who has so far yet to comment on this blog, called this post “fluffy”. Hmm. Let's challenge him to make his presence known and to defend that bald accusation! ;)

Wulfs, waúrms, and *wargs — oh my!

Unpacking some boxes from storage a couple of weekends ago, I unearthed a long-forgotten gem: Brian Regan’s Dictionary of the Biblical Gothic Language. Out of print, unavailable from Amazon or BookFinder, I’m glad I never got rid of this. It originally belonged to my oldest friend, Gary Schmidt, but he passed it on to me some time in the middle 1980’s.

In his introduction, the author calls this “the first complete Gothic-English dictionary in eight decades” [1]; so I’m torn between being relieved that the complete lexicon of attested forms is short enough for convenient use (about 200 pages of fairly large type) and the sad realization that so many, many words of 4th Century Gothic are now lost forever.

To bring this around to Tolkien (more or less inevitable with me), it’s pretty well known that he developed a soft spot for Gothic after first discovering it in his mentor Joe Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language. He wrote a pretty well-known poem in it (“Bagme Bloma” — Gothic for “Flower of the Trees”), included in the rare collection, Songs for the Philologists. He also incorporated elements of Gothic names into the ancestors of the Rohirrim as part of the backdrop for The Lord of the Rings. And Tolkien was known for deploying his extensive understanding of comparative Germanic phonology in an effort to extrapolate the forms of unattested Gothic words. (Such words are generally preceded with an asterisk, as in *wargs in the title of this post.) There’s even an extended piece of Gothic in one of Tolkien’s letters — a facsimile of an inscription he made in a book he owned in 1910 (the image at the upper right is a part of that inscription). [2] My friend Gary once adapted this same inscription on the flyleaf of a Dutch-English dictionary he gifted me back in the early 1980's; sadly, I'm not sure I have it any longer. Maybe one of these days, I'll get a letter inquiring about it, as Tolkien did in 1965.

Fellow admirers of Tolkien will probably recognize the Gothic words in the title of this post, too, even without any special training. For those who don’t, they are: “wolf, worm (i.e., dragon), outlaw (> warg)”. They’re actually in the nominative singular form, but to speakers of English they look more like plural forms this way, so I left them. For anyone wanting to take a stab at Gothic (but who might be too intimidated by Joe Wright), David Salo (known for his work on Tolkien’s invented languages, especially Sindarin) has put together a simple — and incomplete, it must be added — outline of Gothic grammar.

(Okay, I'm betting this post will have scared off the few readers I had! Anyone who’s still reading, drop me a comment! ;)

[1] Regan, Brian T. Dictionary of the Biblical Gothic Language. Phoenix: Wellspring, 1974, p. vii.
[2] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, pp. 356-8.